REVIEW: Hostess Donettes Maple Glazed Mini Donuts

Hold the phone, lower the pitchforks, and pause the Science Channel Documentary on Unicycle Wheel Hubs because, potentially freeing us from the burden of choosing between pancakes and doughnuts ever again, Hostess has stocked the shelves with new Donettes, all gussied up with maple frosting.

This promise bodes well in a person whose fingers twiddle at the mere thought of a powdered Donette poofing the cusp of one’s upper lip. While we are few, I know there are other, like-minded packaged doughnut enthusiasts out there. These Donettes? They offer a bright new hope for both Donette aficionados and indecisive breakfast eaters alike, so put away the doughnut pan and that bottle of Aunt Jemima. There is no need for syrup where we’re going.

Mini doughnuts can be like small dogs: bold, yippy, potentially overrated, and/or cute. You never know what you’re going to get. In this way, they are always surprising. Here, we’ve got a crumbly cake of a doughnut. It’s moderately soft and, while not exactly fresh (hey, it’s been in a sack for a few weeks), it’s also not too dry, greasy, or messy to be offensive.

The glaze is all around and cracks through with a good combination of gritty and smooth. When combined with the neutral cake beneath, the taste comes through with vanilla, artificial maple flavor, straight sugar, and…science!

Sometimes, science has positive outcomes, like when you build a space satellite or invent a gym sock that always smells pleasant. Other times, science has negative outcomes, like when you create a shrink ray and your neighbor’s baseball crashes through a window and you accidentally shrink your offspring (lookin’ at you, Wayne Szalinski).

Here, science did okay. While all the preservatives saved the Donettes from mold and sustained its certain cakey quality, there’s still a bit of a metallic afterglow in the cake that keeps me from giving these an A-plus endorsement. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not like you’re eating the crushed metallic remains of the Terminator or anything, but the slight chemical aftertaste keeps the flavor from being the full-throttle, running-from-rampage, Terminator 2 Arnold Schwarzenegger-type of a Donette it could be.

As packaged donuts go, these succeed fairly well. They’re not too sweet, messy, or dry and have a delicious sugared glaze that crackles into maple-like sugar as you bite in. They’re also not perfect. Indeed, you may find yourself pushed away by the slight chemical aftertaste, the fact that they’re not doused in Grade-B maple syrup, or the non-fresh nature of Donettes as a whole.

On the other hand, if you enjoy packaged doughnuts, have a predilection toward maple syrup flavors, and struggle with Pancake-Doughnut Indecisiveness (a serious social issue), you may never have to make a decision about breakfast again, and that’s a platform I can get behind. Less stress. More mini doughnuts.